Contrast that with the Colbert who tried to calm his audience’s nerves in 2016. “But now politics is everywhere, and that takes up precious brain space we could be using to remember all the things we actually have in common,” he said then, with an optimism that in hindsight reads as naïveté. “So whether your side won or lost, we don’t have to do this shit for a while.”
“We did this four years ago and we have learned a lot,” executive producer Chris Licht said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Colbert and Licht will return again to Showtime on Tuesday night for another live election special, this time with the title of Stephen Colbert’s Election Night 2020: Democracy’s Last Stand: Building Back America Great Again Better 2020. There will be no audience this time, on account of the pandemic, and—Licht hopes—no surprises either.
“We have spent an enormous amount of time preparing for all eventualities,” Licht explained. “So that has, I think, calmed our nerves a little bit. We are absolutely overprepared—he said naively. Whereas, four years ago we went into the night thinking, ‘Well, we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen.’”
Indeed, if the prior Colbert election special is remembered for anything, it is that shock. The episode played out like a car crash in slow motion, and it’s easy to see fragments of material on-air that were likely envisioned for a different result. Colbert, in fact, concluded his 2016 show with a litany of ideas Americans should, in theory, agree on despite political persuasions. Above all, he said, “we as a nation agree that we should never, ever have another election like this one.”
“Now please, get out there. Kiss a Democrat, go hug a Republican, give a Libertarian a reach-around. I don’t care,” he said as the crowd cheered. “The election is over.” If only it had turned out to be that simple.
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